Getting the Good Stuff: Mark Haskell Smith’s Heart of Dankness

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Connoisseurship is hip right now. Not 100 feet from my apartment, there’s a coffee shop whose menu reads like a map — Colombia, Honduras, Rwanda — and every few months, I get together with some friends to taste different whiskeys (we’re not as insufferable as we sound). Hell, there are at least five restaurants I can thinkamsterdamtodayauc of in Los Angeles that serve artisanal sausages. For whatever reason – maybe it’s an extension of the hipster windowskeys.net desire for obscurity and authenticity – but knowing what the good stuff is and where to get it has never been a bigger deal.

Perhaps that’s why Mark Haskell Smith’sHeart of Dankness so resonated with me. Smith ventures ADM-201 to Amsterdam to cover the Cannabis Cup, the world’s premiere marijuana expo, trade show, and competition. When sampling a particularly potent strain called John Sinclair (named for the manager of the proto-punk band MC5), Smith experiences a moment of epiphany, the words floating above his head in cartoon font — “This shit is dank.” And so begins a quest to get to the root of what, exactly, “dank” is.

I like my nonfiction to be both entertaining and edifying, and Dankness delivers both. Smith dives deep into the world of high-end cannabis, from the cobblestone streets of Amsterdam to the near-ubiquitous and semi-legal medical marijuana dispensaries of Los Angeles and Oakland to the clandestine grow sites of the Mexican Cartel. His experience as a novelist 300-206 serves him well, as he brings to life the many growers, vaporists, budtenders, breeders, and activists who make up the cannabis industry. We learn about the different effects 600-199 of sativa and indica, the two strands of pot that each produce very different highs. Indica, with its sledge-hammer heaviness, dominates the California market at the moment, while the light, cerebral high of sativa permeates the Dutch coffeeshop scene. We learn, too, about the landrace strains Buy Windows 10 product key of marijuana that seed companies keep in vaults. These genetically pure strains are “the primary colors” of the seed business, combined to make endless new 70-246 variations of weed, each with a slightly different flavor and feel. Smith is so adept at describing the strains that they almost become characters themselves, albeit characters with really great names like Super Lemon Haze, Kosher Kush, and Trainwreck.

If you want to know how the contemporary cannabis industry operates, Heart of Dankness is the book for you. But beyond that, Dankness is a great book for anyone with an inclination towards connoisseurship, because dankness, it seems, is at least in part about circumstances. The right thing at the right time in the right place with the rightpixelartshop.nl people. A perfectly cooked egg might be considered dank if you ate at precisely the right time and place. Or an ice cold glass of your 700-039 favorite beer at the end of the longest, hottest buy windows 10 key day of the year. Quality is a part of it, to be sure, but you can’t underestimate the situational 300-070 component. This, ultimately, is why the book holds great appeal beyond the world of Buy Windows 10 key marijuana aficionados. Take it from a guy http://www.pass4lead.com who hates 400-351 reggae: I highly recommend picking up Heart of Dankness, whether you have a doctor’s recommendation or not.

Patrick Brown
is a staff writer for The Millions. Patrick has worked in the book business for over seven years, including a two-year stint as the webmaster and blogger for Vroman's Bookstore. He is currently the Community Manager for Goodreads.com. He's written book reviews for Publishers Weekly, and he's spoken about books and the internet at the LA Times Festival of Books, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association spring meetings, and the 140 Characters Conference. He writes the sporadically entertaining Tumblr blog The Feeling.

I longed for a contemporary novel about contemporary life. I longed for references to malls, and to boners, and to "intense cell phones" and to a pillow made of denim with an actual jeans pocket on the front, "like it thinks it's Bruce Springsteen."

More importantly, Sinclair, now an Amsterdam resident and serious pot advocate, was sentenced to ten years in prison for the possession of two joints in the early 1970s. It took a major rally played by by no less than John Lennon and Yoko Ono to get him out. Hence the branding of the potent “John Sinclair” strain.

Yeah, but did you ever go to a barbecue where John Sinclair was there? Did you ever get high with him? He was actually one scary guy. But everybody loved him and freeing him from his prison sentence was about the hugest thing that ever happened in Ann Arbor, where a lot of huge things happened.
What is funny is that I recently finished reading John Irving’s Until I Find You, much of which takes place in the 70s in Amsterdam. What a city. I mean, then there is Eliza in Neal Stephenson’s first volume of The System of the World trilogy. Must be the home of dank.

Like millions of other Americans, I spent the weeks after September 11, 2001, struggling to understand how the tragic events of that day could have happened. CNN’s Aaron Brown and Paula Zahn came to feel like permanent guests in our living room. I watched Frontline documentaries. I scoured obscure websites on Islamic fundamentalism. I read – or, rather, tried to read – Ahmed Rashid’sTaliban, one of the few English-language books then in print on recent Afghan history. I wasn't a complete moron. I had heard of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, and I was old enough to remember the tales of the plucky Afghan mujahideen bringing the Soviet military to its knees in the waning years of the Cold War. But none of what I already knew, even when combined with the new facts I learned that fall, added up to 19 guys hijacking four planes and flying them into buildings full of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.
It is only recently, through Steve Coll’s masterly Ghost Wars, first published in 2004, that I have begun to feel like I understand, viscerally as well as intellectually, what started the terrible train of events that ended that bright fall morning now almost ten years ago. There are armloads of first-class histories of the period, ranging from Lawrence Wright’sThe Looming Tower to the U.S. government’s own 9/11 Commission Report [pdf], and I heartily recommend all of them, but if you only have time for one book on the subject, make it Ghost Wars.
Histories of Islamic extremism written for an American audience have to confront this country’s fundamental ignorance of the Muslim world. In Taliban, Rashid, a Pakistani journalist, deals with this problem by ignoring it and diving headlong into the hellish cauldron of military alliances that beset the Afghan capital of Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 as if the rival Afghan leaders Ahmad Shah Massoud, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and Mohammad Najibullah were household names. For this reason, Taliban may be one of the least-finished bestsellers in recent memory. In contrast, in The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan refugee who has lived in the U.S. since 1980, presents the rise of the Taliban in a way guaranteed to make Americans feel at home. Hosseini, who lived only a few years in Afghanistan as a child, portrays the sectarian conflicts between the Pashtun and Hazara factions in the country of his birth as analogous to racial strife between white and black people in the American South, and in case that isn’t familiar enough, he gives his principal baddie, a neighborhood bully who becomes a Taliban leader, a Hitler fixation. The Kite Runner has sold millions of copies and been made into a Hollywood film, but really it says more about the lenses through which Americans see the Muslim world than it does about how the Muslim world actually works.
Coll handles his readers’ ignorance of his subject by rolling up his sleeves and explaining, in a remarkably patient, non-partisan way, the whole ugly history of America’s involvement in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in 1979. Naturally, this takes some time – the book is almost 600 pages long – but it makes for riveting reading. One comes away from Ghost Wars with two seemingly paradoxical impressions: 1. unlike most American civilians, U.S. politicians and military leaders saw 9/11 coming years before it happened; and 2. barring a run of stupid luck, they had almost zero chance of stopping it, given the geopolitical realities of the pre-9/11 world.
American diplomats and spies spent years pressing our Islamic allies, particularly Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to force the Taliban to give up bin Laden. President Clinton and his security team spent hundreds of hours poring over satellite images and intelligence reports, trying to pin bin Laden down so they could kill him before he attacked us. They failed, and thousands of Americans died, followed by thousands more in the two wars that followed, but a fair reading of history suggests they were fighting with both hands tied behind their backs.
The Original Sin of America’s involvement in Afghanistan – our clandestine arming of the mujahideen and our abandonment of the country after the Soviet retreat – makes a great deal more sense when viewed in context. It would have been politically foolish, and morally craven, to leave the Afghans defenseless against the Soviets in the 1980s, and once the Soviets left, there was exactly no political support for getting in the middle of a civil war in a distant country many Americans would have had trouble finding on a map. Likewise, while in hindsight it is hard to understand how American politicians allowed Pakistan to so openly drag its feet in challenging its Islamist allies in the Taliban, at the time the far greater worry among Western policymakers was that nuclear-armed Pakistan would pick a fight with its nuclear-armed neighbor, India, and blow Central Asia off the map.
The past is a foreign country, as the British novelist L.P. Hartley famously said, but every now and then a work of history offers a guidebook to that country, not as it looks to us now, but as it was then. It is a cause for celebration, then, that in an age when telegenic polemicists like Glenn Beck and Rachel Maddow dominate the public debate, that real journalists like Steve Coll can still do their work.

If you're thinking about taking a road trip in America this summer, you might want to consider leaving the GPS and the Rand McNally at home and, in their place, packing a bewitching new book called The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States by Cynthia Enloe and Joni Seager. While it won't help you negotiate those ring-shaped parking lots around Atlanta or Washington, D.C., this idiosyncratic travel guide will reveal how life is lived today in any state you happen to pass through. By the time you finish digesting the book's short essays, colorful graphics, charts and maps, you'll understand that the 50 states were not created equal. Geography does matter. Enormously.
As its subtitle suggests, the book's authors set out to strip away the popular myths that distort many Americans' view of their homeland and its place in the world. The authors accomplished this by analyzing a small mountain of data, including U.S. Census reports, the findings of prisoner rights research groups, the United Nations, the Pew Foundation and organizations monitoring college athletics, plus Bureau of Labor statistics and corporate annual reports. They then synthesized this data to produce a series of vivid snapshots about America's distribution of wealth, religious attitudes, employment, home ownership and homelessness, sickness and health, prisons, immigration, gun ownership, environmental degradation, corporate power, military spending, and even the worldwide popularity of the Barbie doll. (She's huge in Italy and the United Kingdom.)
The findings are by turns surprising, predictable, frightening, encouraging, amusing, and maddening. For instance, we learn again and again that Texas is a state of extremes: it has executed the most people since 1976 (463); it has the highest percentage of hunters (Pennsylvania ranks second); it has sacrificed more of its citizens to the Iraq War than any other state except California (414 to 468, with Pennsylvania a distant third at 195); it has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance (26 percent); and it has a gross domestic product equal to Russia's.
While such facts are interesting in themselves and valuable for the global perspective they provide, they are not this book's greatest strength. Where The Real State of America Atlas truly shines is in its demolition of the notion – the enduring fantasy – that America is a land of equal opportunity, a place where boundless bounty awaits anyone who is willing to work hard and play by the rules. With a relentless parade of statistics, the authors make a compelling case that the playing field is far from level and the American Dream is, increasingly, becoming the destiny of the privileged few as it slips beyond the reach of most members of the middle class. Forget about the poor.
Consider these numbers: there are 413 billionaires in America with a combined net worth of $1.4 trillion; the richest 1 percent of Americans own 35 percent of the total wealth; the poorest 40 percent own 0.2 percent of the wealth; 19 percent of American households have zero or negative wealth. "Almost a fifth of American households have an annual income of less than $20,000," the authors write, "and 15 percent of Americans live at or below official poverty levels... The wealth gap in the U.S. is considerable and growing fast." Yet even as the federal budget went from a $236 billion surplus to a $1.5 trillion deficit in the past decade, many lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, insist that continued tax breaks for the rich are vital for the country. The super-rich aren't the only culprits in our looming national debt crisis. More than half of the foreign companies and 42 percent of U.S. companies doing business on American soil paid zero federal income tax for two or more years between 1998 and 2005. In 2009, General Electric, Bank of America, and CitiGroup paid exactly nothing. Only in America.
Sometimes the book's statistics merely buttress the obvious – Americans are religious, they own a lot of guns, they love sports and cars, they're increasingly conservative and insanely overweight, they're not much interested in what's happening beyond their national borders, and, for a people descended largely from immigrants, they're oddly suspicious and resentful of recent immigrants. That said, the authors do sometimes counter well-known facts with counter-intuitive anecdotes, such as the revelation that for all the God-fearing that goes on in America, the number of atheists and agnostics has doubled, from 8 to 16 percent of the population, in the past 30 years.
It's worth pausing here to consider the authors' bona fides. Cynthia Enloe is a political science professor at Clark University and the author of 11 books, including The Curious Feminist and Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War. Joni Seager, a geographer and global policy expert, teaches at Bentley University in Boston and has written many books, including four editions of Atlas of Women in the World. Given such credentials, it's perhaps not surprising that the authors occasionally leave themselves open to the criticism that they're promoting a leftist, feminist agenda. Worse, they sometimes slip into muzzy writing, such as: "Despite a long history of peace activism, many Americans have absorbed militaristic ideas: for instance, believing that soldiering is the highest form of patriotism, that the world is full of enemies, that protecting against terrorists trumps civil rights, that men are the natural protectors of women, that jet bombers overhead make sporting events exciting, and that Commander-in-Chief is the President's most important job." No doubt many Americans do believe these things. Just as surely, many don't believe them. But how many? And what do these competing beliefs tell us about the nation at large? Unfortunately, the authors don't say.
But such missteps don't diminish this book's real and valuable achievements. Enloe and Seager have produced a timely reminder that America is a place where the deck is stacked, where the rich keep getting richer, and where nothing is going to change until the members of the great, duped, sinking middle class wake up and realize they've been sold a bill of goods.